Mass. colleges, companies take plunge into big data

At Worcester Polytechnic Institute, professors are conducting studies on so-called big data processing that could result in programs to run an automatic trading system and detect medical fraud.

In Marlboro, Sepaton Inc. provides data protection for large enterprises that manage massive amounts of data. The company sees its future mainly in industries such as health care, government, financial services, telecommunication and retail.

In technology, big data, a new field of study, is used to describe the massive amount of data made available by the Internet that is too large and complex to manage with traditional data processing tools.

Big data comes from social-network websites but also from climate information sensors, cellphone GPS signals and even blood pressure records at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Together, these sources create an amount of data that is so big that it becomes difficult to process and analyze but remains potentially very useful.

According to IBM, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data were created each day in 2012, and 90 percent of the data in the world has been created in the last two years.

To exploit this massive volume, Massachusetts has nearly 100 big data and analytics companies, ranging from multinational corporations such as EMC Corp. to growing younger companies such as VoltDB, ParElastic and Hadapt.

Although most big data companies in Massachusetts are in or near Boston or Route 128, Central Massachusetts plays a role.

Customers of Sepaton, from Massachusetts and across the country, are mainly corporations that need to protect large amounts of data, rather than small businesses that are looking for data processing solutions, according to Sepaton’s product manager Peter Quirk.

Sepaton has 140 employees, and a large number of them are data engineers.

According to a recent report issued by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council, the state’s employment in the big data sector may grow by 50,000 jobs in the next five years, and by 2018 there will be an estimated 120,000 jobs in the state’s big data industry.

IBM Mass Lab, which opened in 2010 and is IBM’s largest software development laboratory in North America, has already brought 3,400 jobs to Massachusetts.

On March 29, the Obama administration announced a Big Data Research and Development Initiative. Six federal departments and agencies will commit more than $200 million to solve “some the nation’s most pressing challenges” by “improving our ability to extract knowledge and insights from large and complex collections of digital data,” according to the announcement.

The day after the Big Data R&D Initiative was announced at the White House, Intel Corp. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology started a collaborative effort that focuses on processing and digesting data.

According to MIT, the project, bigdata@CSAIL, will involve both the Intel Science and Technology Center and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. The Intel Center for Big Data will be led by MIT professor and principle investigator Sam Madden and Michael Stonebraker, an adjunct professor at MIT. The project will receive $2.5 million a year for up to five years from Intel. The project will involve 25 CSAIL professors and several undergraduate and graduate students at MIT. Researchers at MIT will be focused on using big data in finance, medicine, security and social media.

As part of the Massachusetts Big Data Initiative, the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative will create a Big Data internship program for college students in the state.

“It’s a good opportunity and a high demand for students with such kind of skills,” said Elizabeth Bruce, executive director of bigdata@CSAIL.

For college students in Worcester, opportunities in big data can be found on campus.

According to associate professor Michael Radzicki at WPI, a new degree program on big data predictive analytic theory will be introduced at the school. The goal is to create data scientists, and graduates will be expected to get jobs in the data analysis area. The program is likely to be available at WPI in a year, said Mr. Radzicki.

However, companies in Worcester still face some road blocks when it comes to big data. One of the problems, said Mr. Radzicki, is that Worcester does not have the sort of entities that will help businesses deal with data storage.

WPI is considering creating a center where businesses could get help for big-data-related problems.

“It’s one thing for Central Mass. to train people in big data or to be good at big data,” Mr. Radzicki said. “The key is how to keep them here. If everything we do is big data, I don’t think that’s going to change the employment situation in Massachusetts or in Central Mass. The business environment has to also be business and employee friendly, where companies and people want to stay here. It has to be relative to other states or other places that offer a better package of stuff.”